Huckabee, ‘Libido’ & Ambition

Over at Breitbart, John Nolte calls out Huckabee’s ‘libido’ comments for the gift to the Democrats that they were:

While speaking before the Republican National Committee’s national convention Thursday, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee blundered his way into the mainstream media’s War on Women trap with comments that have already lit up Twitter, MSNBC, CNN, and elicited condemnation from the White House.

While Huckabee was obviously trying to make a point about how Democrats view women, his phrasing is already catnip for a hostile media that looks for any reason to permanently define the GOP with one of the Democrat Party’s phony narratives:

“If the Democrats want to insult the women of America by making them believe that they are helpless without Uncle Sugar coming in and providing them for them a prescription each month for birth control because they cannot control their libido or their reproductive system without the help of government.”

To anyone who understands how today’s media operates, Huckabee’s use of this kind of phrasing and language boggles the mind and seems almost intentionally designed to damage the Republican Party. Already engines of feminist outrage are firing up to scream about Huckabee’s “crass” view of Democrat women and the government programs that help them.

Huckabee’s remarks appeared to have been prepared. So you have to ask yourself why risk launching a thousand cable news segments that ask, “Does Mike Huckabee believe women who use birth control can’t control their libidos, and is that a problem for the GOP?”

Nolte’s question is reasonable enough. Why would Huckabee, who is no fool, say something like this? My first guess was to blame it on the intellectual bubble in which he clearly lives.

But perhaps there is something else. Maybe, looking at it from his perspective, these remarks were not a mistake. Huckabee knows that he has no chance of winning the White House, and next to none of winning the Republican nomination. On the other hand, language like this (and the controversy it stirs up) may appeal to that segment of the Republican base that will be essential to his being a potential contender in the GOP primaries for 2016, a position that is, of course, key to his continuing career in the media.

In the meantime he has done his bit to contaminate the broader Republican brand, and in an election year at that.